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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis: Review

A Jacob Lawrence painting come to life, this debut novel of blood and milk chronicles a black woman’s journey from Georgia to Philadelphia in the 1920s through the lives of her nine children. In Ayana Mathis’s novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, they turn out to be juke-joint players, preachers and everything in between, but Mathis, just out of the University of Iowa, makes their fates feel so urgent it’s as if the Great Migration happened yesterday.

A Jacob Lawrence painting come to life, this debut novel of blood and milk chronicles a black woman’s journey from Georgia to Philadelphia in the 1920s through the lives of her nine children. In Ayana Mathis’s novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, they turn out to be juke-joint players, preachers and everything in between, but Mathis, just out of the University of Iowa, makes their fates feel so urgent it’s as if the Great Migration happened yesterday.

That mass exodus of blacks to the north is often viewed as a one-way trip. Mathis reminds us this was not so. Blacks may have had more freedom in the north — if lesser danger from racially motivated violence can be described so — but a different kind of rupture awaited them. The food was different, the clothes were stranger, people were left behind, and others went back. Home was a long way away.

This is the case for Hattie Shepherd, the books heroine, who leaves Georgia in 1923 as a teenage bride for Philadelphia, with two twins, a young husband, and some family up north waiting for her. Shortly after her arrival, some of her family already gone back to Georgia, Hattie’s twins die and this book’s steamroller of loss begins its devastating forward march.

Fast forward 25 years and we glimpse one of Hattie’s sons, Floyd, on the road playing in juke joints in the deep south, discovering a part of his identity, which even the liberties of Philadelphia would not allow. His chapter sets a call-and-response syncopation to the book’s song. Home is a prison to some, and for others it is a place of nurturing.

As the novel’s title suggests, this is a book of a dozen narratives.

Each one leaps forward in time and conjures another offspring of Hattie, in one case two children, whose experience of sexual abuse has cast a pall over their whole lives. Mathis may be young but she has woven this cast together masterfully. Each chapter not only swiftly and beautifully sketches a new life, but it deepens our understanding of Hattie, and her sprawling family.

There are many mature truths realised in the small details of this great book. Among them: that the shame of poverty lies as often in the lying about one’s circumstances as it does the circumstances themselves; that mothering is equal parts love and rage; that a woman can carry a family on her back if she has to, but when she does she often has a man up there too; that dignity does not come from suffering, but one’s response to it.

This is not borrowed finery. The Great Migration has been endlessly studied in American history and African-American studies departments, its long aftermath chronicled by writers as supernaturally talented as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, and its mythology painted by all the great artists of the Harlem Renaissance, for starters.

That Mathis has entered this crowded field at the beginning of her career and written so well we forget all this historiography is nothing short of astonishing. One by one, each of this book’s twelve chapters sounds a depth charge into a character’s life, a charge so powerful we forget we’re reading, we forget the long history of African-Americans in the 20th century has already been told. We are simply with someone, on a journey, that began long ago and has one determined, sometimes deranged source. Her name is Hattie Shepherd and it’s a name you’ll hear a lot of in years to come.

John Freeman is the editor of Granta and the author of The Tyranny of E-mail.

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